Kit Carson's Epic Exploits
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Summary
Within the space of just three decades, monumental episodes of exploration, expedition, politics, and violence, including the mapping of the Oregon Trail, the acquisition of California, and the Mexican-American Civil War, forever changed the history of the United States and the shape of the American West. And one man, an illiterate trapper, scout, and soldier, was there for it all: Kit Carson.
Transcript
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Hey, this is Brett. This is a rebroadcast of episode number 681, The Epic Exploits of Kit
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Carson with historian Hampton Sides. Hope you enjoy it. We'll see you on Wednesday with a
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brand new episode. Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Within the space of just three decades, monumental episodes of exploration, expedition,
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politics, and violence, including the mapping of the Oregon Trail, the acquisition of California,
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and the Mexican-American Civil Wars forever changed the history of the United States and
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the shape of the American West. And one man, an illiterate trapper, scout, and soldier was there
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for it all, Kit Carson. In his book, Blood and Thunder, The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the
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Conquest of the American West, author and historian Hampton Sides follows Carson as a through line in
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this extraordinary period of American history. Today on the show, Hampton and I discuss how Kit
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Carson became a living legend through embellished accounts of his heroics and yet undertook real-life
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exploits that were nearly as unbelievable as the tall tales told about him. We explore how Carson
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joined the grizzled fraternity of mountain men in his youth and the wide array of skills that helped
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him excel as a trapper. We discuss how Carson then parlayed those skills into becoming a scout
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on expeditions that took him from St. Louis to California, over the Rocky and Sierra Mountains,
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and all throughout the wild, rugged West. Hampton shares how these expeditions turned Carson
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into a national celebrity and what this frontiersman thought of his fame. Hampton also impacts
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Carson's complex relationship with American Indians and how he respected and adopted the ways of
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some tribes and yet fought viciously against others. And we end our conversation with why he
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decided to become an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, his initially reluctant and
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then brutal campaigns against the Navajos, and his legacy today. After the show's over, check out
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our show notes at aom.is slash Carson. Hampton joins me now via clearcast.io.
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All right, Hampton Sides, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on a couple years ago to talk about your book, On Desperate Ground, which was about
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the greatest battle of the Korean War, The Chosen Reservoir. Brought you back on because I want to
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talk about a book you wrote, it's almost 13 years ago. And I think you started it even like back in
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2002. It's called Blood and Thunder. And it's about the famed trapper, mountain man, scout, soldier,
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Kit Carson. I'm curious, what drew you to Kit Carson as a subject?
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Well, Blood and Thunder isn't really a biography of Kit Carson. It's, you know, it's using Kit Carson
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as a through line to tell a much bigger story. And what drew me to Kit Carson was that this one man
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in the span of one lifetime went everywhere, did everything, knew everybody, somehow intersected
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with history in this consequential way, and enabled me as a writer to tell this bigger story of the
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conquest of the American West. In a single generation, the Western third of the continent
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became the United States. What's amazing about Carson is that even though he wasn't a general
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West Pointer, a writer, a big-time politician, you know, he was essentially a nobody, an illiterate
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frontiersman, he knew everybody. And when you start charting the big events of Manifest Destiny and the
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conquest of the West, somehow or another, he was there. He was always there. Or if he was not there,
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he missed it by five minutes, you know, his best friend was there or his wife was there or his,
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you know. So it's a great through line to write about this much bigger story, which is really what
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I was interested in because I had moved to the West. I moved here to Santa Fe and I was looking for a big
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canvas kind of story to sink my teeth into, try to understand this land out here and how it became
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part of the United States. It really then becomes the story of Native Americans. It becomes the story
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of Spanish Americans, the mountain men who were mostly French, and these sort of spiral of events
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that led to finally the Mexican-American War and also the Civil War, which most people don't realize
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there were actually some pretty consequential battles that took place here in the West during the Civil
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War. So it's got all these different chapters and episodes, but that through line that keeps
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returning is this one man who is very controversial. He was an Indian lover and he was an Indian killer.
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He married into, his first wife was Arapaho, his second wife was Cheyenne. He spoke six or seven
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different Indian languages, but he also fought against different tribes and especially is famous for his
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conquering the Navajo and leading them on their notorious long walk. So I was drawn to that part
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of Carson's life too. The fact that he was so controversial, so conflicted, had sort of this
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deep love and appreciation for Native American culture, but also fought against Native Americans
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in big ways that still have ramifications today. So yeah, I think when I read this book, I was like,
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this is just, it's, it's epic. I mean, the stuff that happened in like, in a short amount of time
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from like the 1840s till the 1860s, I mean, it's mind boggling, like how much happened. I think what
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we've been going through in the past decade here in the modern age, I think, oh man, things are just
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going so fast, but like big changes, monumental changes happened in a matter of years back then.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially during the Mexican-American war, when, when President Polk
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took office, he cast his eye West and, you know, he decided he wanted all of it. You know,
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he wanted the Oregon territory, which is, or Oregon and Washington now. He wanted California,
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which was nominally part of Mexico, but was kind of semi-independent. He wanted
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the New Mexico territory, which was part of Mexico and he wanted Texas and, you know,
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everything in between. He wanted, he wanted ports on the Pacific. He wanted
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this relatively small country to become an empire. And he wanted, he wanted it all in, in, in, in one
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fell swoop and he got it all during the Mexican-American war. It was a, it was a brutal and relentless
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land grab. It was pretty shameful in many, in many respects, but he achieved what he sought out to do.
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After one term in office, he went home to Tennessee and in a few months he was dead. James K. Polk kind
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of came out of nowhere and achieved what he said he was going to do. And suddenly the United States
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had grown by about the size of continental Europe. It's just, yes. And those events that led to all
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that just happened so fast and furious. And it's so hard to even keep track of them all and all the
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different characters. But one person just kind of treads right through the middle of it. And that's
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Kit Carson. And that's why he became such an interesting kind of connective tissue for this
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larger story. Well, let's look at the life of Kit Carson. And along the way, we can talk about some
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of these big events that he was involved with, with, with an American history. So let's start off
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when he was born. What was America like when Kit Carson was born? Well, he was born in Kentucky,
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but moved very, very soon thereafter to Kentucky. And, you know, there was, there was this
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slow but steady march westward to find, you know, untouched land. And he, he was part of that
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movement. His parents were, he was distantly related to Daniel Boone. And these were true
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frontiersmen. They moved to Missouri, but beyond Missouri, you know, it was wilderness. And the notion
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was that sort of the middle third of the country was going to be set aside for the Native American
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tribes, many of whom had been relocated, forcibly relocated during the Trail of Tears and other,
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and other forced relocation sagas like that. But then beyond the plains, there was this all,
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this whole other part of the continent that was not very well understood. It was, part of it was in,
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you know, part of Mexico. Part of it was just wilderness that had been not, you know, had not
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been mapped or explored very much. And then you finally get to the Pacific coast and you get a
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different continental powers that are vying for and interested in controlling particularly the Pacific
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Northwest. The British are interested in it and have lots of little tentacles in that part of the
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world. The Russians are still trapping and exploring up around Alaska and working their way down the
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coast. California was part of Mexico and, you know, and by extension, part of the greater kind of
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Spanish empire. So everyone had their eyes on this great prize of kind of the virgin far west. And
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the United States was beginning to express its interest in having all that. And so Carson's
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family moved from Kentucky to Missouri, which was, that was the end of the line. I mean, you know,
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St. Louis was kind of the gateway to wilderness. And there was a trail that was formed from Independence,
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Missouri to Santa Fe, known as the Santa Fe Trail. And that was kind of the one little tentacle that,
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you know, where there was some trade and there, you know, there were, there was expeditions
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west. And Carson, as a young boy, his father died when he was eight. And his stepfather, he butted heads
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with his stepfather and he wanted to get the hell out of his home environment. He became an apprentice
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to a saddle maker. But then he started, you know, hearing these stories about these mountain men,
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these people out west that came west on the Santa Fe Trail and went into the mountains and trapped
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beaver. There was a tremendous amount of money to be made doing that. It was an adventurous life. It was
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a dangerous life, but he wanted to be part of this fraternity of greasy, grizzled old mountain men.
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And he ran away. When he was about 16, he ran, ran away to Santa Fe and really never looked back.
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He went up into the mountains up around Taos and he slowly but surely worked his way into this fraternity
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of men and became, in the end, one of the most famous mountain men of all. So that's how he got his start
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in the west, trapping beaver, which was an incredibly valuable asset because, really, because
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for some reason, people back in London and Paris and New York had decided that a beaver hat was the
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finest hat you could have. It was a fashion statement. And so, you know, really, these men
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became so proficient at trapping beaver that beaver became nearly extinct in many parts of the west.
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But along the way, they learned how the rivers, you know, how the drainages flowed, you know,
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where, which, you know, the big rivers, the little rivers, they learned essentially, if not formally to
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map the west, at least to get around. So they sort of made a mental map of the west. And these mountain
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men, with all this knowledge of this territory that was otherwise unexplored, then went on to become
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scouts and guides in various topographical expeditions into the west. And so this was
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valuable information that they had. And Carson was, you know, proved to be the very best one of all of
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the mountain men to make that transition from trapping beaver to guiding formal expeditions
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Well, one thing you talk about, and you quote people who talked about the skills that Carson
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had. I mean, he was just, in any situation in the west and the wilds, like, he could handle
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himself. And what were some of the skills that he was famous for that he had?
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It wasn't any one thing that Carson had that made him so competent at what he did. It was a kind of
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a panoply of skills. He knew when to fight. He knew when to bluff. He knew when to negotiate. He was
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cool under pressure. He was really, you know, he was a great horseman, although most of these guys
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didn't have horses. They had mules. They really trusted their mules. And, you know, they always say,
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you know, the horse won the west. It actually wasn't a horse. It was a mule that won the west.
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But Carson was, you know, good with a knife. He was good in a fight. He was an expert marksman,
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a good hunter. He was a decent cook. He was just somebody you wanted on your side when you're out
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in the wilds. And it's kind of extraordinary, given how many scrapes he got into with different
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Native American tribes over the decades, that he lived to a fairly ripe old age in those days and
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died of natural causes. He somehow knew where to be and had a sixth sense for, you know, when to fight
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and when to avoid a fight. He also had a really remarkable, even though he was illiterate, a
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remarkable gift for language. He was fluent in Spanish. He was fairly fluent in French. And he
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knew multiple Native American languages and sign language. So he was great at communicating. And
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all the different expeditions remark about that, that, you know, he was the guy that came forward
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and, you know, figured out what was going on and communicated with the local tribes and, you know,
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was able to negotiate whatever it is they wanted or needed at the time. So those are some of his
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skills. He certainly had a temper. And if you riled him, he would not back down. He was ferocious
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and he was relentless and he would pursue you. And I guess that's his other famous skill was pursuing
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people. He was an amazing tracker and would sometimes track a fugitive or, in one famous case,
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a woman who had been kidnapped for days and days and days across the mountains and the plains. And he
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could read, you know, read the signs on the ground and was quite famous for this skill, which is really
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almost mystical skill, you know, to look at the grass and try to determine how old a particular
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footprint is. You know, I don't know how people do that, but he was apparently phenomenal at that
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skill. Well, it was during his time as a mountain man where his complex relationship with Native
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Americans began. This is when he married. He married two Native American women during this time.
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Yes. His first wife singing grass was Arapaho. And a lot of people say that those were his happiest
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years was when he lived with her tribe, her band of Arapaho Indians, and really lived more like an
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Indian than a white guy, than an Anglo, and had two children with her. Unfortunately, she died in
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childbirth. He raised their children and along the way married a Cheyenne woman. That marriage
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did not work out very well. And it ended in what they call the Cheyenne divorce, where she basically
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kicked him out of her teepee. But, you know, all this is just to say that he was somebody who
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respected and, you know, found a lot of power in Native American traditions and language and
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lived with great respect for certain Native American tribes. There were other tribes that he seemed to spend
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much of his life fighting against. And maybe foremost among those were the Blackfeet and also
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the Comanches and sometimes the Kiowas. So, he didn't really look at Native Americans in a monolithic
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way, like Indians, you know, out there. He was very specific in his allegiance to certain tribes
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tribes and his often lifelong antipathy to other tribes. So, it was very interesting. His third and
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his final wife was Spanish, came from an old Spanish family in Taos, Josefa Jaramillo. And so,
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he then sort of just organically morphed again into kind of like a Spanish guy. He spoke Spanish. He
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converted to Catholicism. He raised his kids to speak Spanish as Catholics and lived in Taos and
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viewed himself as allied, you know, aligned with Spanish New Mexico, which, of course, they've been
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there for hundreds of years. So, it's interesting. This guy just keeps kind of like a zealot figure,
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you know, he keeps kind of changing into whatever, you know, and he's like a cat who had nine lives.
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He, you know, went from being a mountain man to, you know, being a rancher to being a scout and a
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hunter. And then he became, finally joined the regular army, the Union army, and fought against
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the Confederates in several battles. And then became, at the end of his life, he became a brigadier general.
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So, he, and there's a couple of other incarnations I just skipped over, like an inter, a cross-continental
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courier. He rode to Washington to give messages. And he was, you know, he's a scout and he was a guide
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and he was so many other things. So, he had this real talent for sort of rebooting himself. As soon as
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one lifestyle seemed to dry up or one set of opportunities evaporated, he would just recreate
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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Well, so as a trapper, he started to make a name for himself, but like where this, where he became
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like almost a living legend was when he became the scout for Fremont, John Fremont. So, for those who
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aren't familiar, who was John Fremont and why was he exploring the West?
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Yeah. Well, John C. Fremont was a botanist and a cartographer living in Washington. Very talented,
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very ambitious, young man, very good-looking dude. Ladies seemed to think he was extremely handsome
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and dashing. And he had, his ambition really knew no bounds. He was all those things I mentioned,
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but he really wanted to be president someday. And like a lot of ambitious young men, he married a
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woman who is the daughter of a very, very powerful man. And this man was Senator Thomas Hart Benton from
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Missouri, one of the architects, if not the principal architect of Manifest Destiny. John C. Fremont
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knew that Benton was his sort of ticket to get to where he wanted to go, which was to explore the West,
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map the West, and then somehow use his fame and celebrity to catapult into a political career.
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Well, it worked out pretty much the way he envisioned it. He married Benton's daughter,
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Jessie Fremont, who was herself just a remarkable woman who, you know, was educated pretty much the way,
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you know, if the Senator had had a son, this is the way he would have educated his son. She didn't go to
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finishing school or anything like that. She, she got a rigorous education and was a, just a very
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shrewd political creature herself. And they became, John C. Fremont and Jessie became kind of like a
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Washington's original power couple. He would go on these expeditions and come back and she would do
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most of the writing because she was a very talented writer and understood kind of the PR aspect of all
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this. It's like one thing to go and describe a bunch of plants and the topography and try to do it
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in a scientific fashion. But those reports that Fremont wrote were rather dull and rather dry.
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She would take these reports and turn them into great stories that became best-selling books and
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that ensured her husband's fame and fortune. And in these books, Fremont was, you know, a dashing
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hero, but perhaps even more dashing hero as depicted in those books was Kit Carson. And that's really how
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Kit Carson became famous. It seems like, you know, on every page, Carson was doing some,
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something daring, something bold, you know, that he was plucky and resourceful and got the expedition
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out of innumerable scrapes. So Carson kind of owed his fame to John C. Fremont and, and, and Fremont's
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wife, Jessie. Carson, however, didn't understand that celebrity. He didn't like that celebrity. He,
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he was a pretty shy and awkward guy. He didn't, he didn't understand why people back East seemed to
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know his name. He had spent his youth trying to get away from America. And suddenly he was a,
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this almost like a action figure hero. He became then the subject of all these pulp novels that were
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written. I mean, really bad, most of them very bad novels, but there were kind of precursors to
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what we now call a Western. And often Kit Carson was the star of these books, the protagonist. And,
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you know, somehow they turned him into like six foot eight, blonde, blue eyed, you know, Aryan
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Viking or something. And he was like five, four, not particularly handsome, shy and awkward around the
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ladies. He just didn't, you know, they, they, they turned him into something else, a kind of a
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caricature. And he spent much of his life trying to live that caricature down, trying to understand it.
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And he didn't get any money from these books. They didn't get his permission to use his name.
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And the ultimate irony was he couldn't read these books, you know, because he was illiterate.
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So he had to have other people read to him, these exploits that were completely, I mean, Carson had an
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amazing life and he did amazing things, but of course that wasn't good enough for these novelists who
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had to exaggerate. It would say like, Kit Carson would kill two Indians before breakfast and which
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presumably was a good thing back then, considered a good thing. And it really, it really set up this
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mythology that Carson spent the rest of his life trying to live down. But all of it goes back to
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Fremont's expeditions, which Benton, Senator Benton was instrumental in commissioning. They left from
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St. Louis. There was three main Fremont expeditions. So Fremont's expeditions West really were important
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historically because he kind of charted and mapped the Oregon Trail, which was then a very crude
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and dangerous route west towards the northwest across the Great Plains. And after his books came out,
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books that were largely written by his wife, this kind of ignited this great migration of pioneers.
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And people said, well, maybe it's not so dangerous. Let's all, you know, then en masse began to
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migrate west along the Oregon Trail. So this is an instance in which cartography and exploration led
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directly to settlement on a big scale, all part of a kind of a master plan of Benton and the others who
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wanted, really wanted the United States to be a continental empire from shore to shore, from sea to
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shining sea. And it basically worked. You know, the first, the first act of occupation and settlement is
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first exploration. And Fremont led those early expeditions and Carson was his guide. And their
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friendship is also a very interesting dynamic in the book is that, you know, the, these two guys were
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kind of codependent, Fremont and Carson, two people who seem to really need each other. You know, Carson,
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very self-reliant guy, but also very conscious of the fact that he was illiterate, that there was a whole
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world back east of educated people, powerful people that he was curious about. Fremont,
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was quite educated and, you know, Carson seemed to defer to him in many ways. When Fremont asked him
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to go do something, sometimes a very unsavory thing, Carson would do it. He was dutiful to a fault.
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And Fremont, meanwhile, he just, he needed a guide. He needed somebody who really knew the west. He
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needed someone who was really proficient in all those skills of survival in an extreme environment
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that Carson already had, having been a mountain man for, for all those years. So these two men
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very much were, I guess, in modern parlance, we'd say they were codependent or they, you know,
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they, they very much relied on each other and they, they did remain friends for, for the rest of their
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lives. So it's an interesting part of Carson's life is, is the extent to which he identified with
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Fremont and needed Fremont somehow to, um, almost like a father figure that Carson seemed to need to
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have. Well, going back to that, you know, this, the celebrity and the books that were written
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back, Carson, one of the most like poignant moments in the book is when you describe this,
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this is like after, I think this is during, after the civil war, when he was basically fighting
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Native Americans, there was a family of settlers. They were kidnapped. White was their last name?
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Carson went to go hunt her, you know, find her from these, I think it was a
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Native American tribe that kidnapped her and he found her, but she was already, she was already
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dead. Uh-huh. But amongst her possessions, she had a book about Kit Carson, you know, who came and
00:27:33.580
saved people. And, you know, that was just like one of those moments, like he, he couldn't live up
00:27:37.520
to the legend. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that is a famous story and it's, it's a hundred percent
00:27:43.540
true. It's almost, it's fabulous, you know, like something that seems so, it seems like it is a
00:27:53.280
made up story, but it is true. He got the assignment essentially to go find this woman who had been
00:28:01.140
kidnapped by Hickory Apaches on the, on the plains. And he spent nearly a week tracking her across
00:28:09.760
the staked plains and he found her, but unfortunately she'd been killed. As you say,
00:28:16.420
in her possessions, they found, uh, the very first blood and thunder book, this, these, these horrible
00:28:21.700
pulp Westerns. And in that book, in that particular story, he was the protagonist. And in the weird
00:28:28.920
plot line of the book was that he had gotten the assignment to go find a woman who'd been captured,
00:28:34.240
who'd captured and kidnapped by native Americans. And he went and found her and saved the day and
00:28:40.960
won her, you know, back and brought her back to her family. That's, that's in the novel. So, and,
00:28:47.720
you know, but he couldn't in real life live up to that legend. And, you know, of course he couldn't
00:28:53.820
read the story either. Someone read it to him and he was like, it just, uh, it was like the first time
00:29:01.260
that he ever became aware of his own legend, you know, that he was some kind of mythological
00:29:08.120
figure back East that these novels were. And of course, this was the first of many
00:29:14.320
of these terrible novels, but it is an amazing story. And, uh, and, uh, Anne White was her name.
00:29:22.160
You can't make this up that her name was White. Her, she'd be coming down the Santa Fe trail
00:29:28.260
with her family. All the men in her group were killed, but she and her African-American
00:29:35.040
slave and her daughter or baby daughter were kidnapped. And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's just
00:29:44.480
one of, you know, this is the thing tracking down stories about kid Carson is just, you know,
00:29:50.120
it's a full-time job. It took, kept me busy for years and years because, you know, there's just so
00:29:55.360
many of them and many of them are false. Uh, many of them were exaggerated, but just as many of them
00:30:01.680
are true. Uh, and you know, it's like if something like that happened in my life, I would say, you
00:30:06.620
know, that was like probably the biggest thing that ever happened to me. The most, well, he had like
00:30:10.680
dozens and dozens and dozens of those kinds of stories all in one life. So it really is kind of
00:30:17.000
an extraordinary thing to think about just all the episodes and incarnations and just tall tales that,
00:30:25.360
actually proved to be true that happened to this one man.
00:30:29.240
So we talked about, so he's a scout for Fremont, the expeditions to California that eventually morphed
00:30:35.420
into the Mexican-American war. There was some crazy stuff in that chapter of like insurrections going
00:30:39.960
on and just nutty stuff. The Mexican-American war happened. Carson got roped into that. He started
00:30:46.580
working with, I was Kearney was the general of the army of the West started fighting in the Mexican-American
00:30:52.300
war. But then after the Mexican-American war, Carson continued to be a soldier. And he actually
00:30:57.980
became an officer for the union army during the civil war. You know, he was rather reluctant to do
00:31:04.360
that. And it was kind of complicated in the sense that, you know, he was originally from Missouri and
00:31:10.120
most of his brothers had sided with the Confederacy and, you know, why he decided to become union officer
00:31:19.160
is kind of interesting, but he, but he did. And he, and one of the many reasons he did is because
00:31:25.280
there was an army coming from Texas to try to claim New Mexico and Colorado for the Confederacy.
00:31:32.780
And Spanish New Mexicans for generations and generations had had this fear and loathing of
00:31:40.200
Texans. In some, in some senses, they, we still do.
00:31:45.840
Yeah. Right. The Tejanos. Yeah. And there, you know, so he was able to recruit very quickly,
00:31:51.280
a pretty large army of Spanish New Mexicans that he commanded and fought against those Texans when
00:31:58.920
they came up the Rio Grande at a place called Val Verde, a really important battle. And one that
00:32:04.840
I think most Americans don't even know happened at all. And, you know, after the Texans were sent back
00:32:12.120
to Texas where they belong, you know, Carson, Harry was still in the union army and he, he basically
00:32:18.620
wanted to go back to Taos and be with his wife and family. But a general by the name of Carlton came
00:32:24.840
along and said, no, well, we're on a war footing now. Why don't we now go after some of these tribes
00:32:33.020
that keep attacking the settlements along the Rio Grande, the wandering tribes, the raiding tribes.
00:32:40.840
And foremost among those at that time were the Navajo, the Diné. And this general Carlton came up
00:32:47.760
with this plan to round up all the Diné, one of the largest tribes even then, and certainly now in,
00:32:55.600
in America and move them to a reservation on the Pecos River where they could be watched and where
00:33:04.480
they could be taught to be sedentary Christian farmers, like completely rewire their society
00:33:11.620
because they were, what they really were, were semi-nomadic sheep herders. And, you know,
00:33:18.160
moving over a huge piece of land, the Diné country was just massive all over the Four Corners region of
00:33:25.960
what we call them the Four Corners now of the United States. And when General Carlton came up with this
00:33:31.900
ambitious plan to sort of rewire the Navajo, he decided that he had to have Carson to actually lead
00:33:38.340
it. And Carson tried to resign. He didn't really want any part of this. He said he had, he had joined
00:33:45.340
the Union Army to fight Texans, not Native Americans. But in the end, he signed on and he
00:33:52.460
thus began really the chapter of his life, the episode of his life for which he is now widely
00:34:00.160
reviled and, you know, hated by Native Americans and hated for just the ferocity of this scorched earth
00:34:09.160
campaign that he led into Navajo country to break their spirit, break their back, you know, break the
00:34:15.760
back of their nation and to march them to this kind of like a prison camp on the Pecos River.
00:34:22.600
This is probably what he's most famous for now. And this long life of many twists and turns comes
00:34:28.280
down to one of the last chapters of his life, the Navajo campaigns.
00:34:32.660
And I thought this was, I mean, this was, this was happening during the Civil War. But I thought
00:34:37.080
it was interesting because most people think, you know, after the Civil War, the Union Army
00:34:40.600
started, they started the American Indian Wars. I mean, Sherman was a big part of that. Like this
00:34:46.680
Yeah. Well, Carson found that it was almost impossible to fight the Navajo, you know, that they,
00:34:53.780
they didn't fight pitched battles, you know, they would raid and retreat, raid and retreat. And
00:35:00.880
Navajo country is so wrinkled and full of canyons. And, you know, they would just disappear. They
00:35:07.460
would vanish into this massive wilderness. And so the only way Carson could fight them was to starve
00:35:13.940
them to death, was to kind of, even before Sherman led his scorched earth campaign across the American
00:35:19.980
South, Carson was doing this and perfecting it, burning every cornfield, destroying every orchard,
00:35:29.140
slaughtering every sheep, every cow, every horse that they came across, poisoning water sources,
00:35:36.580
destroying salt sources, literally starving the Navajo slowly but surely to death. And, you know,
00:35:44.400
this is one of the reasons why the Navajo, you know, they never forgot and they never forgave. It's like
00:35:50.180
it happened yesterday because it really had a psychic effect because not only were they being
00:35:57.380
attacked, but it was their very land, their sacred land was being attacked. And Carson proved to be
00:36:04.000
very good at this. He didn't want to do it. He tried to resign several times, but once he signed on,
00:36:10.900
you know, he was brutal. And, and it worked because of in tens and twenties, and then finally by the
00:36:19.980
hundreds and thousands, the Navajo surrendered and they went on their long walk. This experiment on the
00:36:26.380
Pecos river did not go well. They hated it. They were miserable. They refused to plant their crops.
00:36:34.060
They didn't want to become Christian farmers. They wanted to go back to their, their, you know,
00:36:42.520
their beloved land. And after the civil war, actually Sherman, who you mentioned does come out
00:36:47.760
to negotiate some treaties and decides that this experiment was a abject failure. And the Navajo
00:36:55.560
after much discussion, they decided to return them back to their homeland, which is one of the very
00:37:01.980
rare instances in our history where, you know, no one, no one apologized, but they admitted the failure
00:37:11.320
of relocating a people forcibly. And they actually returned them to their ancestral lands, which is
00:37:18.180
instead of Oklahoma or some other place, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles from where they actually
00:37:23.700
are from. So the Navajo were returned in this, uh, another long walk, but a joyous one back to the
00:37:32.020
Dine country where they, they are now the largest, the largest, uh, reservation in the, in the country.
00:37:39.180
And one of the largest native American tribes in the, in the country. So, but you know, Carson,
00:37:46.060
like I've said several times, he was illiterate. We don't really know what he thought and felt
00:37:53.440
about all of this. I think he felt, there, there are some indications that he, he certainly felt
00:37:59.960
reluctant to do it in the first place. And then he felt, obviously, um, he recognized that it was a
00:38:05.880
failure, that it didn't work. And many, you know, thousands of Navajo died. There was outbreaks of
00:38:11.600
different diseases and, you know, it was, you know, just a great tragedy that didn't really need to
00:38:18.440
happen. And again, Carson was kind of at the center of it, but he did spend the rest of his life
00:38:24.020
really quite directly advocating on behalf of various Native American tribes and establishing
00:38:32.100
treaties with particularly, he was very close to the Utes and went all the way to Washington with a
00:38:38.320
group of Ute elders and negotiated a treaty that was quite successful for, for, and led to the creation
00:38:46.260
of their own sovereign lands. But this Navajo campaign, I think just remained a stain on his
00:38:53.280
career for the rest of his life and really is the thing that he's most famous for all these many years
00:39:00.280
later. Yeah. I mean, I thought you said how Carson, like he, ever since he was a trapper,
00:39:07.640
like, like the way he looked at Native Americans, he looked at, he viewed Native Americans as Native
00:39:12.880
Americans viewed Native Americans, right? It's like, instead of a white person, a European at the
00:39:17.760
time, like think of Native Americans as a monolith and they're all the same. Carson understood, no,
00:39:22.680
like they, like they, they all think they're the best people. Like they are, like the Comanches are
00:39:27.980
the people or the Utes are the people and every other tribe. And Carson kind of had that worldview as
00:39:34.440
well. Right. He did. He did. And to his credit, I mean, I, I think that he isn't, you know, in a
00:39:40.540
completely different class of figures in the American West. I mean, this was no Sheridan. This
00:39:46.180
was no Chivington famous for his massacres. This was no Custer. This was a guy who really actually
00:39:53.520
understood a lot about Native American life and saw that most of these clashes that were happening out
00:40:01.180
in the West were happening because white settlers, white miners, you know, Mormons and missionaries
00:40:07.320
were changing the West and encroaching on Native American territory. And he hated what was happening.
00:40:15.520
And I think maybe on some level, he understood that he himself had brought this on by virtue of
00:40:22.700
leading those expeditions to the West. And, you know, he had sort of fouled his own nest because he
00:40:28.940
loved the American West and, you know, the, you know, the pristine West that he roamed over when
00:40:36.440
he was in his twenties as a mountain man had been ruined by, by, you know, igniting these mass
00:40:44.000
migrations of, of Europeans, Anglo, Anglo Americans. So, you know, in his later years, as he's negotiating
00:40:51.780
treaties and giving testimony to Congress, you see a very different Carson. He's, he's quite
00:40:58.660
contrite. Uh, uh, he hates what has happened to the West and he hates, you know, I mean, there's just
00:41:06.160
a lot, you know, a lot of, of course, don't forget the gold rush, which he actually is thought to have
00:41:13.640
played a bit, bit of a role in himself. He, uh, he may have, he was transmitting some messages to
00:41:20.240
Washington and in one of the saddlebags, it's thought that the very first mention of gold being
00:41:26.780
found in California was in one of those saddlebags. So, I mean, even, even the gold rush, he may have
00:41:32.000
helped ignite. And, you know, I think the real tragedy of Carson's life story is that he kind of
00:41:39.880
ruined his own paradise in one lifetime. And, you know, near the end of his life,
00:41:46.160
the transcontinental railroad has come. And I mean, the old West that he knew is over and it's a whole,
00:41:54.340
it's a whole different world when he died in 1868. Well, Hampton, where can people go to learn more
00:41:59.860
about this book and the rest of your work? Well, obviously, you know, anywhere where books are sold,
00:42:06.080
but I always encourage people to go to independent bookstores, which are struggling and suffering during
00:42:11.300
this pandemic, or my website, which has legit all kinds of information, which is hamptonsides.com.
00:42:19.700
Fantastic. Well, Hampton Sides, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:42:24.360
My guest today was Hampton Sides. We talked about his book, Blood and Thunder,
00:42:27.380
the Epic Story of Kit Carson, The Conquest of the American West. It's available on amazon.com
00:42:31.780
and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his website,
00:42:34.920
hamptonsides.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Carson. You can find links to
00:42:40.540
resources. We can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM
00:42:51.960
podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives,
00:42:55.840
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